


want you in my room

by beethechange



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Dirty Talk, Frat Boy/Nerd AU, M/M, Pining But Make It Dumb, Shane Madej Getting History Boners is Canon, Shyan Exchange 2k19, prove me wrong
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-07
Updated: 2019-08-07
Packaged: 2020-08-10 22:46:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20143234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beethechange/pseuds/beethechange
Summary: As they watch, Tall Guy takes his beanie off, revealing a mess of thick, shiny brown hair. He runs his hand through it to shake out the hat hair and Ryan feels like he’s stuck in an Herbal Essences commercial, excepthe’sthe one making inappropriate lustful noises.Ryan adjusts his snapback, determined. He is, after all, wearing his very finest basketball shorts, without even a single hole at the hem, and the knowledge puts an extra spring in his step.“I’m gonna climb that dude like a tree,” he tells Curly.





	want you in my room

**Author's Note:**

  * For [smilingsarah10](https://archiveofourown.org/users/smilingsarah10/gifts).

> This one’s for SmilingSarah10, for whom it is my great honor to offer this very late-breaking pinch hit for the Shyan Exchange. Their prompt asked for frat boy Ryan awkwardly trying to court history nerd Shane, with a dash of Curly on the side, and that ish is my bread and butter, baby! 
> 
> Fun fact, “Any rating is fine” translates directly in my brain to “better make it real smutty and include ~3425 f-bombs.”

*

Ryan’s positive, when he spies the tall dude in the beanie across the room three hours into the first party of the new quarter, that he’s never seen _that_ guy at the Sig Chi house before.

Sure, Ryan is often moderately to extremely tanked by this point in the festivities, as he is on this fine evening, but he still thinks he’d remember an _actual_ giant with a very distinctive nose lurking around the house clutching a red solo cup in his massive, beautiful hands. 

The guy’s leaning against a wall, talking to a tiny girl with a disproportionately large shock of curls springing out from her head. He’s got on big clear-framed glasses and he’s wearing a button-down with a jean jacket layered over, despite it being September in LA and about eighty degrees out. He looks like a hot hipster accountant who’s never stepped foot in a frat party in his life.

Maybe it’s just because he’s six drinks in, but Ryan suddenly and desperately longs to test it.

Ryan gives Curly a nudge. Curly doesn’t drink, and can therefore be trusted to fill in the gaps in Ryan’s memory that would otherwise be lost to time or jagerbombs. It makes him an excellent wingman.

“Hey, who’s that dude?”

Curly glances around the poorly-lit basement.

“There are approximately three hundred dudes in this room, all of them sweaty and drunk, and dibs, by the way. Can you be more specific?”

Ryan gestures up and down his own body, indicating length, and then he points in the tall beanie’d guy’s general direction. “The tall-for-no-reason one. With the, you know, hands.”

Curly follows his finger and squints. “I mean, there’s probably _a_ reason. Genetics. Drank his milk as a _niño_. Maybe someone put him on a table and, like, stretched him to get information out of him.” He waggles his eyebrows at Ryan and mimes stretching his hands about, oh, eight inches apart. “Don’t know him. Why, you interested?”

Exploring his long-suppressed bisexuality is still kind of fresh for Ryan. Like all new and exciting things, he has been pleased, over the course of the last ten months or so, to throw himself into the discovery process with zest and verve. Have his grades suffered? Possibly. But what is college for, if not learning new things about oneself at the expense of acquiring actual useful skills?

“Maybe. What do you think it’s like, being with someone that tall?” 

“Logistically complicated,” Curly says, a little darkly. “Going right after that nerd dong, huh? Boy, when you do something you really do it.”

As they watch, Tall Guy takes his beanie off, revealing a mess of thick, shiny brown hair. He runs his hand through it to shake out the hat hair and Ryan feels like he’s stuck in an Herbal Essences commercial, except _he’s_ the one making inappropriate lustful noises.

Ryan adjusts his snapback, determined. He is, after all, wearing his very finest basketball shorts, without even a single hole at the hem, and the knowledge puts an extra spring in his step.

“I’m gonna climb that dude like a tree,” he tells Curly.

“Good luck, enjoy the view,” Curly says. “If you get stuck up there and need help getting down, just text me and I’ll call the fire department. They can come with a very large basket and a can of tuna to lure you down.”

He’s laughing at his own joke when the short curly-haired girl wanders off in the direction of the bathroom, leaving her cup in Tall Guy’s free hand. Ryan, sensing his chance, makes his move. For certain definitions of “move.”

*

“Hey bro,” Ryan tells Tall Guy, because he’s still new at the whole picking-up-guys thing and honestly, he wasn’t that smooth to begin with, even with girls. 

Tall Guy flinches at the “bro” and gives him an appraising look, taking in the snapback and the tank top and the shorts and the socks Ryan’s wearing pulled up to mid-calf, which had seemed like a good idea at the time. Ryan’s keenly aware that he looks like the absolute worst stereotype of a California frat boy—or best, depending on your perspective.

Tall Guy doesn’t seem to be going with best.

“Hey?” he says, but it comes out more like a question.

“Ryan,” Ryan says, by way of introduction. “Ryan Bergara. I’m one of the brothers here. Not sure I’ve ever seen you at a Sig Chi party before.”

“Shane,” Tall Guy—_Shane_—says, gesturing at his own chest with a (so long, really obscenely long, what the fuck) finger. “Gadiel invited me, figured I’d stop by. Didn’t realize I’d have to show my papers to be let in.”

Ryan realizes that Shane thinks Ryan’s _hassling_ him, which is not what he intended. “Oh, no. God no. I wasn’t—everybody’s welcome. I was just curious. I figured I would have remembered you, if you’d come around before.”

He means it as value-neutral, but Shane’s mouth migrates to one side of his face, pursing in on itself, and Ryan realizes that Shane has taken this, too, as an insult.

“It’s true, I didn’t get the memo about the uniform,” Shane says, and he looks again down the length of Ryan’s body to his socks. “I accidentally wore real clothes a grown man might own. Embarrassing. But then I expect you guys need to be able to jump into a six-on-six pickup game at any moment, right?”

“Five,” Ryan corrects without thinking. “Basketball is five players per team. So five-on-five.”

Shane raises an eyebrow and shrugs in a disinterested way, taking a sip of his beer, and man. This isn’t really going how Ryan had envisioned it. He needs to turn this ship around fast.

“This house is super haunted,” Ryan blurts out, going hard to starboard. It’s not the best flirting technique he’s ever tried, but it’s also maybe not the worst. “Did you know?”

Shane squints at Ryan over the edge of his solo cup. Ryan has the uncanny sense that Shane is trying to figure out whether Ryan’s fucking with him or not.

“I—what? What’s happening here?”

“It’s true,” Ryan insists. He can feel himself getting animated, talking too quickly, slurring his words a little in his excitement, but he can’t help it. Documenting the history of the Sig Chi house—and, okay, investigating it for evidence of ghosts—is a pet project of his. “A pledge fell from an upper balcony in like 1972. Also they say this one brother’s girlfriend got, like,” Ryan lowers his voice and tries to sound less excited, “_brutally murdered_ in one of the bedrooms fifty years ago, but I haven’t been able to find any proof of that.”

“You make being in a fraternity sound so appealing,” Shane says drily. “What with all the falling off of balconies and the murdering. I already thought frat houses were full of horrors, but I had no idea.”

“Last year I had the craziest spirit box session upstairs, dude, you wouldn’t believe—” Ryan starts.

Shane leans back even further against the wall, crossing his arms across his chest. How he manages it while double-fisting solo cups, Ryan can’t quite say.

“I’m gonna stop you right there,” he says. “The hell’s a spirit box?”

“It’s like a radio, right? Well, it is a radio. Only it scans through frequencies at this insanely quick rate, so any time you get full words or sentences out of it, that’s gotta be a ghost reaching out!”

“Oh, it’s got to be? It’s just _got to be_ a ghost? It couldn’t be, oh, I don’t know, multiple bands of the same radio station?”

“It’s science,” Ryan says, doubling down even though he has a sinking feeling that it's really only kind of pseudoscience-adjacent.

“Is it, Ryan? Is it _science_? Is it peer-reviewed?” Shane’s looking at him incredulously. “Am I going to open up next month’s Scientific American to find a cover story on spirit boxes?”

Ryan’s not fond of the way Shane is repeating his own words back to him in that tone, like he thinks Ryan’s a total idiot for even saying them out loud. And yet he’s also _really_ fond of it; he feels his heart going nuts with the adrenaline of a building argument, and something in him is super into the edge of disdain in Shane’s voice. He kind of wants this enormous Big Bird nerd of a man to loom over him all night, looking down his glasses and insulting him and then maybe going up to Ryan’s room with him and—and—

Well. Either way he wants to keep winding this guy up and see what happens.

“I mean, it’s not quite as accepted in the ghost-hunting community as dowsing rods, which I also use. I like to keep it analog, you know?”

“Ghost-hunting community,” Shane says, not bothering to hide the exasperation. “How many more of you are there?” His eyebrows are drawn together and he’s looking at Ryan with a little more interest now, like he kind of wants to take out a notebook and start making an anthropological study of him.

Ryan’s about to try to come up with some sappy rejoinder when Shane looks at something over his shoulder. Ryan twists around to see that the short curly-haired girl is back from the bathroom. She gestures at Shane, _come here_. Shane drains one of the cups in his hand and hands the empty to Ryan.

“That’s my cue,” he says. “Well, Ryan Bergara, it was a sincere pleasure to meet you. You’re a real weird guy. Dumb, but earnest. Thank you for surprising me tonight.”

He claps Ryan on the shoulder with surprising firmness and wanders off in the direction of the girl and the door, and then he’s gone.

Dejected and confused and all keyed up from the argument he didn’t even get a chance to properly settle into, Ryan heads back to Curly. He tosses Shane’s cup in a trash bag on the way, not sure how he feels about the fact that the guy called him dumb _and_ foisted literal garbage in his hand and Ryan still wants to talk to him again.

“Straight, huh?” Curly asks. “Girlfriend?”

Ryan shrugs. “It didn’t come up. I think we were arguing. He called me dumb.”

“Hot.” Curly’s drinking tea from a mug, blowing on it to cool it off. He looks a little ridiculous doing it here in the middle of a frat party, but also entirely unbothered about that in a way Ryan respects. “You should pursue him.”

“What, like on foot?”

“No, you should court him. Woo him. Whatever.”

“Oh my god, you sound like my grandma. Anyway, literally yesterday we had the annual Consent Matters, You Fuckheads, No Means No seminar. Dude’s clearly not interested.”

“Ryan Steven Bergara, that is loser talk, for losers,” Curly says. He points his finger right in Ryan’s face. “You probably just took him by surprise with your small yet mighty jock energy. You’ve gotta give people time to adjust to that.”

“Woo, huh?”

“Yeah, why not? Some of the best romances in all of literature are rocking those sexy sniping vibes. Beatrice and Benedick. Darcy and Elizabeth. Anne of Green Gables and that kid who made fun of her hair, also of Green Gables. One man’s fighting is another man’s foreplay.”

“Ever since you picked up that English lit minor everything you say is the worst. I hope you know that,” Ryan tells him, because somebody should.

Still, Ryan will take it under advisement. His blood is still buzzing, and it’s not _just_ from the two jagerbombs, three cans of PBR, and a cup of jungle juice. Although it is also that.

*

By Sunday, the day before classes are due to start, Ryan’s gathered up the courage to talk to Gadiel. It takes a while because Ryan’s always found Gadiel a little intimidating.

He’s almost gathered up the courage. Really he’s lurking outside the TV room where Gadiel’s watching reruns of “his stories,” a ritual that sometimes takes hours and which the other brothers leave him to in peace.

“Man, why you lurking in the doorway staring at me?” Gadiel demands without turning around.

Ryan slinks into the room.

“I wanted to ask you about that guy Shane who you invited to the party on Friday.”

Gadiel cocks his head, thinking.

“Tall? Like, yea high, 80% leg?” Ryan throws his hand up over his head to indicate extreme and unnecessary height. “Very shiny hair? Mostly eyebrows and nose?”

“Oh, _Shane_. What about him?”

“What’s his…deal? What’s he into?”

Ryan’s still hovering in the doorway, in case Gadiel gets sick of dealing with him and throws a pillow or beer can in his direction.

“What, man? Or do you mean who?”

Gadiel cackles at that, proud of having sussed out Ryan’s true intentions.

“Yeah, I guess. Girls, guys?”

Gadiel thinks for a minute. “He’s into old people,” he pronounces, and turns back to his stories.

Ryan blinks. He can work with a lot, but that might be a deal-breaker.

“How old are we talking?” 

“Old. Like, real old. Like, dead,” Gadiel says. Ryan’s just about to carefully prod around the edges of _that_ when Gadiel continues, “He’s into history and shit, that’s all I know. He was in my summer Am Hist class and he wouldn’t shut up about how Benjamin Franklin was a pervert who had all sorts of kinky orgies. Thought he was funny, told him to come hang, that’s all I got.”

“What, like the president? That Benjamin Franklin?”

“Yeah, probably,” Gadiel says. “I look like I know about old presidents?”

He really doesn’t. Ryan doesn’t either. Still, he files it away for later as a good talking point, should he run into Shane again.

The problem is that it doesn’t give him many leads for making that happen. UCLA is a big campus, with over 30,000 undergrads alone. The odds of running into someone organically when all you know about them is that they have nice hands, possess an aura of sexy condescension, and like to talk about ye olde orgies are slim.

Luckily for Ryan, fate intervenes.

*

Ryan hasn’t even had time to begin the lengthy stalking process—not that he’s above doing that—when the universe provides.

He walks into his class early Monday morning (early for him, which is 10:30 am) and the first thing he sees are long, long legs stretched out in front of one of the desks in the very front row, so long they would still be a tripping hazard even if their owner sat up straight.

Ryan follows the legs up to the face of their owner, and then he makes eye contact with Shane and gets to watch Shane do an exaggerated double take.

It’s true, this is a class in the history department, so it’s not the biggest coincidence in the world. Ryan had needed a liberal arts credit, had signed up for this one at random because it fit in his schedule and sounded marginally more interesting than the other surveys.

Ryan carefully steps over Shane’s outstretched legs and drops into the seat next to him.

“Fancy meeting you here, Legs.”

“It’s Shane.”

Ryan gestures down at the legs in question. “Is it?”

“Am I being punished for something? Why are you here?”

Ryan looks around the room, at the other students filing in, at the smartboard and lectern at the front, at the desk in the corner where a harried-looking grad student is stapling syllabus handouts together.

“This is a college,” he tells Shane. “People come here to learn things, or so I’m told. Some of those people have gen ed requirements they need to fulfill before they can graduate.”

Shane stares at him. “Okay, but a history class? This class?”

“Some of those people may have misread the info sheet, thought it said _pubic_ history, and not realized their error until last night at ten pm,” Ryan says delicately.

Shane throws his head back to laugh out loud at that. “It’s Intro to _Public_ History_,_ you idiot. Like…for the people. The public. Museums and archives and shit.”

“Well I know that _now_.” Honestly, Ryan still doesn’t know what public history entails or at what point it would be appropriate to ask. He’d been thinking of dropping the class; now, of course, he’s got a compelling reason to stick around. “Fewer genitals than I was hoping for, but that doesn’t mean it’s entirely worthless.”

Shane’s still laughing a little, shaking his head. He’s also playing with his pen, rolling it between his fingers in a way Ryan finds _very_ distracting. Only when the prof rolls in to start the lecture does he tear his eyes away.

*

On Wednesday he brings Shane coffee. He sets it down on Shane’s desk and slides in next to him, sipping his own iced mocha.

“What’s this?” Shane asks. He holds up his cup. It has _Legs_ scrawled in messy, loopy writing on the side.

“It’s coffee,” Ryan explains. He can be patient, but jeez, he thought this guy was supposed to be smart.

“Is this going to be a thing?”

“What, me bringing you coffee? Yeah, maybe. It’s only three days into the quarter and you already look fuckin’ exhausted, dude. If we’re gonna be partners on this final project I need you at your fighting weight.”

Shane sits back a little, bewildered. Ryan keeps his eyes deliberately disinterested, looking down at today’s reading even though he can feel Shane’s eyes on the side of his face.

“Final project?”

Ryan flips to the back of the syllabus and plunks it on Shane’s desk. “Wow, he didn’t even read the syllabus. Some nerd you are. Look, we’re supposed to pair up to produce a public history project. Topics are due in a couple weeks and I don’t know anyone else in this class, and it’s sort of looking like you don’t either, so.”

Shane looks around the room, evaluating his options. He must come to the same conclusion, because he shrugs. “I know what the assignment is, I just…fine. You can’t call me Legs, though. That’s not a—we’re not doing, like, rude nicknames. I’m putting the early kibosh on that particular fratty instinct.”

“If you didn’t want to be called Legs you wouldn’t have so much leg,” Ryan points out, he thinks reasonably.

“It’s a perfectly normal amount of leg!”

Now it’s Ryan’s turn to deliver a condescending shoulder pat. He bends over slightly to get another look. “Man, it really isn’t.”

*

The next weekend they meet at the library to start brainstorming ideas for the final project.

A thing most people don’t know about Ryan, making assumptions as they do about his affinity for sports and his dedication to the frat, is that he actually spends a lot of time at the UCLA libraries. They know him by name at Night Powell because of his tendency to hang out there late into the night when he’s caught up in some research spiral or another. Sure, it’s not the most credible research, but it still technically counts.

Today they meet up outside Young, on Shane’s suggestion. Ryan’s not sure if Shane thought it would have better history resources or whether he’s just wary of being spotted together. Ryan has this half-baked notion that if Shane is seen in public with someone wearing a Lakers jersey he might melt like the Wicked Witch of the West.

Shane notices the Lakers jersey first thing. He doesn’t say anything, but he does bite the inside of his cheek.

“Oh, like you’re any more appropriately dressed,” Ryan says, handing Shane one of the boba teas he picked up for them both. “It’s seventy-five degrees out and you’re wearing flannel. I’m surprised you don’t have a jacket with those elbow patches on them.”

Shane flushes a little at that, which Ryan takes to mean he does in fact own such a jacket. Ryan kinda wants to see him in it, and also out of it.

Shane takes a cautious sip of the boba. His eyebrows go up in surprise. He’s got really good eyebrows, Ryan thinks, even though he’s not normally in the habit of noticing eyebrows. Very expressive.

“Hey, this is great!”

“No shit. You’ve never had boba?”

Shane shrugs and takes another sip. “I’m from Chicago, we don’t really have it there. I’m a senior, but I only transferred here from Northeastern Illinois in the spring. I hadn’t gotten around to trying it yet.”

“Stick with me, my guy. I’ll introduce you to all the best things.”

Ryan isn’t trying to flirt, specifically, but he’s also not trying too hard _not_ to flirt. It’s still unclear to him whether Shane is picking up what he’s trying to put down. Shane hasn’t mentioned anything about a girlfriend, but then Ryan hasn’t asked. Every once in a while he does catch Shane looking at him out of the corner of his eye, but Ryan can’t tell if it’s interest or radiating disdain for Ryan’s entire way of life.

Shane leads them past the reading rooms and up into the stacks. It’s still pretty quiet up here this early in the quarter, and there’s plenty of stray seating scattered around. Shane brings them to a secluded corner with a table and two comfy chairs up on three, which Ryan knows to be the history floor.

“This your secret nook?” Ryan throws himself into one of the chairs. “I bet you bring all the guys you study with here.”

“Only the ones I need to be able to murder and get away with it if they annoy me too much,” Shane says grimly.

They lay their papers out between them, and Ryan sets up his laptop to take notes.

“Okay, so,” Shane starts. “I had this idea. Maybe it’s no good, but.”

Ryan pauses expectantly over his keyboard. “I mean, you’re the history major. God knows I’ve got nothing.”

“The idea’s to design a project that makes history fun and interesting to the public at large, right? Someone who would never pick up a scholarly history book, but they might go see Hamilton.”

“Hamilton’s dope,” Ryan agrees.

“Well—right. So I was thinking, what about a short-form video that was sort of, like, poking fun of some crazy history story? I was thinking a panel of a few people to talk through the story, and maybe some cool graphics or animations.”

“How short form?”

“Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes? Something we can stick on YouTube so we won’t have to pay for a platform or distribution, and that we can make by December without driving ourselves crazy. History’s basically just storytelling, so the trick is to choose a story that’s inherently sort of bugfuck insane.”

“Like President Ben Franklin’s weird sex cult thing.”

“You know about—oh, hang on,” Shane leans forward in his chair, tenting his fingers together like he’s about to interrogate Ryan. His eyes are beseeching. “Ryan. Ryan, _please_ tell me you know Ben Franklin wasn’t a president.”

“Then why’s he on the hundred dollar bill? Why’s it all about the Benjamins, huh, Shane? See, I know things.”

Shane sits back with a whoosh of breath. “Unbelievable. You know, in some ways you’re the ideal partner for this project because you’re also the audience for it. You’ re just…unburdened by knowledge of the past. Like a blank slate.”

“Oh, yeah, like knowing how every person who’s been murked in the state of California in the last hundred years bit the dust _isn’t_ a burden,” Ryan says. “But you’re right that I’m the best partner. I’m a film production major, so if you want to do this, you hit the fuckin’ jackpot. Are you—have you heard of UCLA Unsolved?”

Shane blinks. “That YouTube show a couple of weird morbid dudes do about spooky shit around campus? Heard of it, never seen it.”

Ryan points to himself. “Hi. I’m that weird morbid dude, nice to meet you. My friend Brent and I film a couple of eps of ‘spooky shit’ every quarter.”

“No shit,” Shane says. He looks—almost impressed, maybe? Or more like right in the middle of impressed and skeptical. Ryan has the sense of having surprised him again, of having subverted one of his entrenched stereotypes about frat guys, and this pleases him enormously.

Ryan’s never wanted to be just one thing; he wants to do whatever he wants, to indulge all the weird parts of himself even if he plays a lot of beer pong on the weekends. He wants to research ghosts and go to Disneyland and play basketball and bro out with his guys and stay up late scaring himself senseless reading true crime shit on the internet. Sometimes he wants to have a girlfriend, and sometimes he wants a boyfriend, and sometimes he wants to sit in a library and flirt with a very tall guy with good hair. He wants it all.

“What are we going to call it?” Ryan asks. “Your nerd show.”

“I thought maybe ‘Ruining History.’ Because we’re going to be turning all the boring shit you learn in high school history class on its head. Puncturing all the progress narratives and bullshit hero stories. I want to be funny, a little risqué, a little mean.”

‘Funny, A Little Risqué, A Little Mean: The Shane Madej Story.” It’s only been a couple of weeks, but Ryan feels he knows Shane well enough by now to know for sure that he’s two of those three things. He’s very interested in learning more about the third. “Tell me more about the risqué stuff.”

They brainstorm for a good two hours, tossing ideas back and forth for the episode they should film to present to the class. Really it’s Shane tossing out ideas and Ryan weighing in on whether they’re interesting or not, from the perspective of a person less inclined to be receptive to history that doesn’t involve grisly murders. Finally they’ve got a proposal to turn into the prof, for the Benjamin Franklin episode just because Shane’s been workshopping it in his head the longest, and they call it a day.

On the way out they walk past Special Collections, and Ryan ducks in to say hello to Heather. Shane hangs back in the doorway, watching.

“Hey, Ryan!” Heather says, sticking her body half out of her office. “Good start to the quarter?”

“Not bad,” he says. He hooks his thumb in Shane’s direction. “The big guy and I are working on a history project for a class.”

“Speaking of history, I found that land deed you were looking for. Schoenburg Hall, right? I made a photocopy.” She pops back in her office and emerges with a manila folder, handing it to Ryan. He can feel Shane’s eyes on his back, wary.

“Thanks, you’re my hero. I’ll be back in probably next week with Brent, we want to get the ep out before Halloween.”

She gives him a cheery wave, and Ryan leads Shane back out into the library’s sunny atrium. Shane’s blinking at him slowly, and Ryan doesn’t think it’s because the sun’s in his eyes.

“The university archivist knows you,” he says to Ryan, like he’s trying to wrap his head around it. “You’re here a lot.”

Ryan shrugs. “She’s the expert on UCLA history. When I come in and do research for UCLA Unsolved, she’s always a big help. I think it’s fun for her.”

Shane’s frowning, and it’s making his eyes crinkle attractively at the corners. Ryan wants to reach out and touch, but he knows perfectly well that fondling someone’s crinkly eye-corners isn’t an appropriate way to grow a friendship.

“What?” Ryan jokes instead. “Just because I’m in a fraternity you think I’m going to burn to death when I get inside the four walls of a library? It’s not like vampires and churches, man.”

“I guess I just didn’t realize you took it so seriously,” Shane says. “I didn’t think you did actual research.”

Ryan shakes his head. “Don’t you get it? You’re a history major, I film spooky stories about hauntings and murders, but in the end we’re two sides of the same coin. We’re _both_ trying to pin down ghosts, buddy.”

Shane shifts from foot to foot at that, looking uncomfortable but also, despite himself, curious. He lets Ryan hold the door for him on the way out.

*

By late October, Ryan has brought Shane coffee three times a week for four weeks. He knows now that Shane likes a light roast, no cream, no sugar, nothing fancy. He knows that Shane will see “Legs” written on the cup and smile and roll his eyes, but he won’t give Ryan sass for it anymore. He knows that Shane will pay him back with a little bag of popcorn from the student center.

He also knows that Shane’s cute curly-haired friend Sara is just that, a friend: one with a gift for drawing that he’s roped into helping them with the Ruining History project. He knows that Shane is single, that he transferred from Chicago because he’s interested in applying to UCLA’s oral history grad program for next fall, that he has an inexplicable fondness for the film Speed Racer.

What Ryan still doesn’t know about Shane is whether he’s interested in dudes, or if more specifically he’s interested in Ryan. He can’t get a read on the guy.

“I have a Shane problem,” he complains to Curly one Tuesday night over cold pizza they dug out of the Sig Chi fridge. 

“¿_Que pasa_, baby?” Curly asks. “You know I’m always happy to advise in the ways of the flesh.”

“That’s the problem, there’s no flesh. I still can’t—I don’t know how much more obvious I can be. He hasn’t shot me down, he just hasn’t acknowledged it either. I can’t tell if he’s trying to let me down easy or what.”

Curly chews thoughtfully. “Have you considered that he might be an oblivious idiot? Like, what if you just asked him out?”

“He’s not, though! He’s super smart. He’s the smartest…” Ryan trails off before he says something embarrassing.

Curly grins anyway, not fooled, and kicks out from his position sitting on the counter to connect his foot playfully with Ryan’s side. “Aw, your crush on that beanpole is so cute, I die. Maybe he just speaks a different love language than you. You’ve been giving him all these coffees but maybe his love language isn’t receiving gifts, maybe it’s words of affirmation. Or acts of service. Or physical touch.”

“Love language?” Ryan knows only enough to know that’s bullshit, but at this point he’s willing to try anything.”

“You should shake it up. Tell him his hair looks good. Do something nice for him. Suck his d—”

“What the fuck do you think I’m trying to do?” Ryan says, interrupting in his indignance. 

“Also,” Curly continues, “have you considered toning down the _dudes_ and the _mans_ and the _bros_? I overheard you guys making plans to work on your thing and your closer was ‘See you there, buddy.’”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Well. I’m just saying for some people it might be confusing if you call them buddy but what you really mean is that you want them to pork you into another time zone.”

“That’s just how I talk!” Ryan protests. “I—it’s California!”

“Mm, I know, babe,” Curly says. “It was just a thought.”

*

Some people bring their laptops to class to take notes. Shane, however, has a black Moleskine notebook. Every class he pulls it out, along with the exact same fine-tipped pen, and takes meticulous handwritten notes in dark blue ink. Every class Ryan watches him, that neat slanted handwriting, the way his fingers grip the pen, the little blue ink-marks that stain them. Sometimes Shane brings the damn pen up to his mouth to chew absently on the tip, and Ryan almost falls out of his chair.

One day, keeping in mind Curly’s unbearably stupid idea about love languages, Ryan tries a new tactic. Actually, in his desperation he throws about three new tactics at the wall to see which, if any, will stick.

“I dig that you hand-write everything,” he tells Shane as they’re packing up to leave.

“Yeah?” Shane asks. “It’s just habit. I remember better if I write stuff out instead of typing.”

“There’s something sort of old-fashioned about it, though,” Ryan says. “Kinda, like…romantic.” Seriously, he doesn’t know how much more obvious he can be here. There might as well be a neon sign flashing above his head that reads ASK ME ABOUT MY AWKWARD LECTURE HALL BONERS.

“I guess so.” Shane’s busy shutting his Moleskine, pulling the elastic over to keep it closed. “I always feel like that when I’m looking at old documents that are handwritten, like there’s a connection to the person who wrote it and I can feel them through the page. Not that my undergrad history notes are going to set anyone’s imagination on fire in a hundred years or anything.”

“Sets my imagination on fire a little bit,” Ryan says under his breath.

“Sorry?”

“I said you have nice hands for it,” Ryan says, which isn’t that much better. He tells himself these are technically words of affirmation, for certain creepy definitions of the term.

“Nice hands for…writing?”

Shane rolls the fucking pen around his fingers, passing it from hand to hand so the nice watch he wears on his left wrist catches the light. Ryan feels like a magpie, caught between the flash of the watch and the flash of the pen and Shane’s exceptional fingers everywhere in between them.

Finally driven to distraction, he reaches out to pluck the pen from Shane’s hand. If Shane had a pigtail he’d be pulling it, but instead he merely engineers it so his fingertips brush Shane’s as he pulls back.

Shane flexes his hand, as if Ryan’s fingers left tiny sore spots behind where they touched. “Give that back!”

Ryan tucks the pen behind his ear. “You’ve got a whole pack of ‘em in your bag. I’m collecting this one as tax for how you distracted me this whole class playing with it.”

“What do you need a pen for? You’ve never taken a note in your life.”

“Excuse you, I have some very important doodles that need doodling.”

“Oh, well, if there’s _doodling_. By all means, don’t let my desire to get good grades, get into grad school, and go on to lead a successful and happy life stand in your way.”

Ryan hears Curly’s voice in his head: what if you _just asked him out?_ _Ask him out ask him out ask him on a date, you coward, ask him. Ryan, just open your mouth and say nice date words!!_

Shane holds his hand out for a moment longer. When it becomes evident that Ryan has no intention of surrendering the pen, he stands and throws his backpack over his shoulder.

“How do you feel about being scared shitless, dude?” Ryan blurts out before Shane can walk away.

Shane pauses. “Weird question. Why, are you planning to break into my apartment and yell ‘boo’ while I’m in the shower or something?”

Ryan almost loses the thread imagining Shane in the shower, but he manages to just barely hang on. “No, I’m…uh. Have you ever done Dark Harbor?”

Shane’s face is blank. “What is that, some weird party drug? I’m not really a tripping balls kind of guy.”

“It’s a haunted house. Well, actually it’s a bunch of haunted mazes held on an actual haunted ship out in Long Beach. It’s got shipboard mazes, some on the harbor, and there are all these hidden bars and stuff. The characters give you tokens to find them. It’s a very multilayered Halloween experience.”

“Spooks on spooks on spooks,” Shane says, but he looks interested. “Ghoulception.”

Ryan gathers his breath and all his courage. “Anyway, I thought maybe if you’re into that kind of thing we could go. Together. On Friday. I don’t mind, um, I could drive.”

Shane considers the offer. “Sure, sounds fun,” he says. “I haven’t done a haunted house since high school. Text me the deets.”

“Deets? Who the fuck says _deets, _it’s 2019!?” Ryan asks to Shane’s retreating back, and gets a (glorious, long, perfect) middle finger in the air for his trouble.

So, there. Ryan’s done it. He’s asked Shane on a date. Sure, he didn’t use the _word_ date, or clarify that it was intended to be a date in any way, nor did he avoid liberally peppering the invitation with the word ‘dude,’ but hey. Baby steps.

*

Ryan’s not sure what you wear to a date that might not be a date on a haunted boat that might not, in fact, be haunted.

He does know that he can’t wear the basketball shorts with the socks again—that’s been made abundantly clear. It’s possible Curly may have burned all his socks just to take the option out of his hands. He settles instead for his most artfully ratty black jeans, the ones with basically no fabric at the knees, and his “Let’s Summon Demons” t-shirt because he thinks Shane will find it funny.

Ryan knows he’s got it bad when he stands in front of his closet for twenty minutes, deliberating which shoes to wear. Curly walks by his open door and stops short.

“No one who’s interested in men is going to be paying any attention to what’s on your feet when you’re wearing those jeans, sweetie.”

“Maybe he’s got a foot fetish,” Ryan says, rifling through a pile of his kicks for the custom Jordans. “You don’t know.”

“Ah yes, the foot fetish crowd. Your target demographic.”

When Ryan pulls up outside Shane’s place and shoots him a quick text, Shane emerges wearing his usual uniform, chinos and a button-down with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows such that Ryan sort of wants to drive his car directly off a cliff out of sheer helpless desire.

He might have a little more product in his hair than usual, but Ryan can’t be sure. In terms of determining whether Shane thinks this is a date or not, the results are inconclusive.

They listen to music on the 30-minute drive down to Long Beach. Ryan considers putting on his makin’ love playlist just in case there’s some chance of subliminally seducing Shane through the power of sexy grooves, but in the end he goes for his regular old instrumental driving mix.

“Big fan of,” and Shane checks Ryan’s phone as he’s pulling into the parking lot across from the Harbor where the Queen Mary’s docked, “the soundtrack to The Conjuring 2, are we?”

“It’s mood music, shut up,” Ryan says. “I like to get myself in the zone to get scared. Although believe me, I won’t need the help.”

And, look, Ryan would _never_ pretend to be scared just to get a guy’s attention, or to make that guy feel big and strong, or as an excuse to slide a little closer to that guy and maybe grab his arm. That would be unethical.

He might allow himself to play up the usual fear a little, though. He might lean into that adrenaline and terror in the interest of facilitating a more successful maybe-date. So sue him.

They get in the line to enter the shipboard mazes, which stretches all the way down the ship’s gangway and into the parking lot. Ryan can’t help but sneak trepidatious glances up at the looming ship, which looks inexplicably beautiful and otherworldly in the dim light of the promenade. He loves to get scared; he loves the way his insides twist and turn in on themselves until he’s unable to differentiate between the fear and the excitement and his stupid crush.

This moment—the tension right before the jump scare, right before the first kiss, _will they or won’t they_—is his favorite. His palms are sweaty with the perfect awfulness of it, shaking with delicious adrenaline as the violins in his head hit the E string and tremble there.

“You’re already freaking out and we’re not already in the thing yet,” Shane observes with an easy smile. “What’s up with that? It’s just a cheesy Halloween attraction, it’s not like it’s real.”

“It might be real,” Ryan says. “Me and this ship, we have a history.”

Shane raises an eyebrow. “What, were you a grizzled old sea captain locked in a feud with a whale in a previous life or something?”

Ryan leans in, keeping his voice low in case the ghosts can hear him from here. “I was here before, in high school. My friends and I stayed overnight in one of the cabins and shit got _weird_. I got it on video, I’ll show you after. I don’t want to mess you up before you go in there.”

“Good lookin’ out, Ryan,” Shane says with a little wheezy laugh, shaking his head like he thinks this is a fuckin’ _game_. “I appreciate your vigilance over the state of my soul.”

Dark Harbor’s a blast, it always is. Ryan tells himself he’s totally going to try being cool for a change, but the minute they get in the first maze deep in the underbelly of the ship, about the girl who drowned in the below-deck swimming pool, he’s already sort of losing it.

“What’s your name, sir?” asks a woman dressed as a waterlogged little girl, her skin blue and decaying, as she jumps out at them from behind a pillar. The torn life vest wrapped around her neck like a noose is a nice touch.

Ryan’s not ashamed to admit it; he _shrieks_. Shane and the fake dead girl both stare at him in surprise, the girl falling out of character in the process, and then Shane begins to laugh.

“Holy shit,” he says, and then he tells the girl, “Uh, I’m Shane. My friend you just gave a heart attack is Ryan.”

“Oh well, it doesn’t matter, you’ll be dead soon anyway!” the girl cackles, pressing a token into his hand, and then she’s off to scare the shit out of the next unsuspecting victim.

“Love that nihilist spirit!” Shane calls after her. Still laughing, he reaches out to tug Ryan in so they’re shoulder-to-shoulder. “Please don’t pass out. I don’t want to carry your ass out of here, but I will if needs must.”

Ryan’s sweating. He’s not sure if it’s from the fear or because he’s imagining Shane throwing Ryan over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and rushing him to safety. He briefly considers faking a fainting spell just to see if he can get Shane to lower him gently to the floor and lean over him and mop his brow.

He dismisses that as too manipulative. Instead he settles for clutching at Shane’s arm for the remainder of the maze, and the next time someone jumps out at them he doesn’t have to fake the way he throws his face into Shane’s shoulder. Shane looks down and snorts, but he doesn’t pull away.

At the end of the final maze they hunker down in one of the secret bars, hidden behind hatch 15. Shane orders something called a _Watery Grave_; Ryan orders an _S.S. Curacao_, made with gin and blue curacao, and has to explain why that’s funny.

“Okay, tell me why this place has you about to poop your pants,” Shane demands when their drinks are mostly gone. “You’re all twitchy and sweaty.”

Ryan looks around again. Then he pulls up the video on his phone, the one that shows the baggie containing his little travel-size toothpaste flying up and across the bathroom. His evidence.

“For context, the night I spent here with my buddies, something kept poking me right in the face. I thought it was one of my friends, but when I looked over they were all asleep. And then the next morning I was in the bathroom getting ready and something sent my toothpaste, like, flying through the air. I—look, it’s on film. Brace yourself, this is crazy stuff.”

“I’m braced!” Shane says.

Ryan sticks the video in front of Shane and presses play. Shane watches the whole thing through once. Then he looks at Ryan and hits play to watch it a second time, head cocked. Then a third time.

“Wow, Ryan,” he says finally. “This is some evidence. I think you’ve really uncovered something here.”

“Right?” Ryan asks, feeling very validated. “I mean, _right_?”

Shane leans in close, and Ryan leans in to meet him, so their heads are just inches away over their drinks.

“I mean, wow. There’s really a dark force at work here. It’s strong, and you can’t run from it, and you can’t fight it, and you can’t outsmart it.”

Shane’s voice is hoarse and low, a rough whisper that makes Ryan’s stomach roil in excitement. He licks his lips, watching as Shane’s eyes flick to Ryan’s mouth and back up.

“Yeah?” Ryan says. Up close like this, Shane’s eyes are dark and twinkling. _This is it_, Ryan thinks. _This is it—he’s going to kiss me—it’s happening._ “What force? You think it could be a demon?”

“Worse,” Shane whispers. “Gravity.” Then he heaves back to burst out laughing, clapping a hand over his mouth when a nearby patron looks over at them. The moment’s gone, the spell is broken—hell, maybe Ryan was imagining it all along. It wouldn’t be the first time he saw something that wasn’t there.

“You motherfucker,” Ryan says. He drains his glass and tries not to be too obviously disappointed.

They head home after that. Shane runs his big hand along the railing on the way out, and Ryan tries not to stare. “You’re a beaut,” Shane tells the ship as they deboard. “You’re a beautiful lady. I love your bones.”

“I love _your_ bones,” Ryan says under his breath.

“Sorry, what?”

_I said I love you_, Ryan thinks but doesn’t say. “I said I love Halloween,” he says instead. Shane gives him a weird askance look but he doesn’t say anything, not a damn thing, and neither does Ryan.

Instead he goes home alone to sulk about it. He’s pulled out all the stops, he’s tried all the love languages, and Shane’s been resolutely unresponsive to all of them.

It’s time, Ryan decides, to—as they say—give up the ghost.

*

So in November, Ryan resigns himself. He’s made a new friend, and that’s good enough. It’s going to have to be, because he’s pulled out his very best game and it hasn’t gotten him anywhere.

Ryan can take a hint. He’s not some, like, _predator_. He’s not some frat guy douche who won’t take no for an answer.

He still brings Shane coffee, because it’s a habit now, and because he likes the way Shane’s eyes light up when Ryan drops the drink on his desk. He’s still a little addicted to that easy, crinkle-eyed smile, to watching the twist of Shane’s wrist as he taps his pen on his notebook when he thinks.

“I’m done,” Ryan tells Curly one night over a half-hearted game of pool. “I’m all out of love languages, man, and by the way they were all equally bullshit. He’s just not that into me.”

“You need to wallow,” Curly says sagely, sinking two balls with a well-placed hit. “Eat a pint of ice cream, listen to some Carly Rae, dance around in your underwear.”

Ryan glares at him.

“Have some no-strings-attached sex with a hot person who looks nothing like your tall shiny-haired nerd,” Curly goes on. “I volunteer as tribute.”

Ryan pokes him with his pool cue. “You’re really not as helpful as you think you are.”

“You haven’t seen what I can do yet, Bergara,” Curly says with a playful flick of his tongue, and Ryan laughs, and honestly it does help ease his bruised ego a little.

Complicating the getting-over-Shane process is the fact that Ryan’s spending so much time with him now, working on this final project. They’re looking down the barrel of the end of the quarter, with less than a month left to finish writing, filming, and editing their Ruining History episode, and it means long hours in the library or the student union or over coffees at Untitled, finalizing the script.

Tonight they’re in the library again. It’s late, nearly eleven. They’re up in Shane’s favorite hidey-hole in the stacks on the third floor, trying to cram as much in before Thanksgiving break as they can. Shane wants to find more quotes because, as he’s told Ryan about ten thousand times in the last two months, “solid primary sources are the foundation of all reputable public history work, _Ryan_.”

Shane gives Ryan a list of a couple of books to track down. He usually does the book-running while Shane does the actual reading, because Ryan has this mysterious affliction where his eyes cross the second he tries to read anything written before 1950.

He’s looking for the library’s copy of _The Writings of Benjamin Franklin_, edited by some dude named Smyth, and it takes him deep into the stacks searching. When he finally finds it, a tattered old book that smells as weird as the letters it contains, Ryan’s seized with a sudden and unprecedented fit of historical curiosity.

He cracks the thing open and starts skimming. Honestly, it’s pretty riveting stuff. Freaky, too. He must lose track of time, because after a while he startles at the sound of footsteps. He looks up and Shane’s there, standing at the end of the bookshelf and staring at him.

“Whatcha doin’, Ryan?” Shane’s voice sounds sort of—funny. Strained.

“I guess I got caught up in this,” Ryan says, turning the book around to show Shane the cover. “Hey, according to this Smyth guy, ol’ Benny Franklin’s ‘animal instincts and passions’ were, _and I quote_, ‘strong and rank.’ Gross, right?”

“So gross,” Shane echoes. He’s still staring at Ryan. Ryan rubs his face, in case he’s got ink on it or something.

“But that’s probably useful, right? For the video?”

“For the—right. The video. You’re reading? An actual history book?”

“Yeah, it’s kind of interesting. I mean, you do always say that solid primary sources are the foundation of—”

Ryan doesn’t get a chance to finish his sentence, because Shane is suddenly closing the distance between them and leaning down. He catches Ryan at the waist with those fucking _hands_, so close Ryan can smell his aftershave.

He gets right in there, hip-to-hip, caging Ryan in so his back is against the bookshelf, fingertips digging into Ryan’s sides. Ryan drops the book to the ground, saying a silent apology to the Smyth guy for the obvious disregard in the face of more pressing business. Shane’s mouth is soft but insistent, which is a thing that Ryan knows now because Shane’s lips are _on_ _his lips_—

He barely gets a feel for the kiss; his brain hardly gets the chance to register that it’s happening at all before Shane’s pulling back again. Ryan makes a disappointed noise, leaning forward for more, but Shane’s moving quickly away again, so no part of him is touching any part of Ryan.

“Fuck,” Shane says. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He looks shocked and, if Ryan’s reading him right, a little nauseated. Which isn’t what you want, necessarily. “Fuck, I am so sorry.”

“I’m—you’re—what?” Ryan asks stupidly. He feels like he’s underwater, sluggish and confused. He can’t get his brain to move faster. All he knows is that Shane swooped in like some sexy overgrown bat, kissed him, and is now standing there breathing at Ryan and looking miserable.

“I’m really sorry,” Shane says. “That wasn’t—just—pretend that didn’t—ugh. Please don’t hate me.”

Ryan opens his mouth to say something, something along the lines of _what the fuck, Shane_, but Shane’s already spun on his heel and fled the stacks. A minute later Ryan hears the door to the stairs slam.

It galvanizes him enough to get him moving. He picks up the book. When he gets back to the chairs where they’d been working, Shane’s is empty and all his stuff’s gone. Ryan had known it would be.

He sends Shane a text, trying to lighten the mood:

_was it something albert henry smyth said?_

_Shane Madej is typing_, his phone tells him. Ryan watches in real time as Shane starts typing and then erases whatever he was going to say, over and over, for a full minute.

_i knew you were a nerd but i had no idea your history boner was that big_, Ryan shoots off. He’s trying to tease Shane into responding, to show him that it’s okay, but it doesn’t work. He waits in that chair in the library until closing time, waiting for Shane to text back, but he never does.

*

He texts Shane a couple more times over Thanksgiving break. Crickets.

Ryan goes over the whole thing in his head, over and over, trying to figure out what went wrong. It hadn’t been a bad kiss. Quick, sure, but hot, and after all Shane had started it. When he gets back to campus he goes over the whole thing with Curly again, to see where it all went sour.

“Maybe he is straight, or thought he was,” Curly suggests. “Maybe you seduced him with the power of history and now he’s having a big boner crisis about it. You were there not too long ago yourself, as I recall.”

“I didn’t have a boner crisis,” Ryan says just for the sake of argument, even though they both know that winter quarter of 2019 was in fact a series of escalating boner crises, plural, that culminated in Ryan asking via humiliating text to borrow a bottle of personal lubricant at three in the morning on Valentine’s Day.

Curly shoots him an incredulous look, but does him the favor of not mentioning that incident.

“You’ve just gotta talk to him, _chero_,” he says gently. Curly does gentle really well. “No one knows what’s going on in that dude’s giant head but him.”

Ryan slumps against his headboard. He’d been afraid that Curly would say that.

He resolves to clear the air the first day back from Thanksgiving break, but Shane doesn’t show up in class. He never misses class—never once the whole quarter, not even when he’d had a really bad cold earlier in the month—and now Ryan’s just a chump sitting alone in class with two cups of coffee.

Shane’s not in class on Wednesday, either. Their project is due in two and a half weeks, and Ryan’s starting to get downright annoyed. His grade in this class aside, it’s just rude to fly at a guy, kiss him, and then vanish off the face of the earth. It’s extremely bad manners.

Ryan sits and stews through the whole class. By the end of it his dander’s so up that he’s up and out the door and halfway to Shane’s apartment before he can talk himself out of it.

He pounds on the door.

After a moment, he hears shuffling on the other side. Shane opens the door. He sees it’s Ryan and goes to slam it closed again, but Ryan reaches out fast to catch the door before it can click shut.

“You weren’t in class,” he says. He doesn’t mean it like an accusation but it does come out that way, a little bit.

“I’m sick,” Shane says. “Real contagious. It’s probably tuberculosis, so.” And then the asshole coughs, _obviously_ fake, not even trying to pretend it’s for real. “Yeah, look, that’s blood. I’ll be dead in a week, so you’d better—”

“Fuck you, man,” Ryan says, feeling another twinge of hurt beneath the annoyance. “I’m not stupid.”

He turns to go. He’s not even sure what he was thinking, coming here like this. Shane clearly has no interest in seeing him or speaking to him. He doesn’t even care enough to come up with a plausible excuse.

“Did you have a good laugh about it?” Shane asks from behind him, sarcastic and sour. “You and all your frat buddies? I bet they lost their shit laughing about the poor nerd with the crush. I mean, in the library? What a stereotype.”

“Yeah, they do think I’m pretty pathetic,” Ryan agrees. “It’s fine if you’re not interested, obviously, but I wish you’d just say so instead of the whole—you know. Kissing, yelling, silent treatment thing. We’ve still got to work together.” 

“Well, it’s fucking embarrassing, alright? I’m embarr—wait. What?”

Ryan pauses on the landing. When he turns around, Shane’s hovering uncertainly, framed in the doorway.

“_I’m_ the poor nerd with the crush,” Ryan says. He can hear himself talking way too loudly, but he can’t help it. He spreads his arms wide as if to say, _take it all in, baby_. “And I’ve been flirting with you for months and you’ve been giving me the brush off, so. Don’t worry about it.”

He’s much too tired, all of a sudden, for games or flirtations or dissembling. He really should have just said it two months ago and let the chips fall where they may. Subtlety’s never been his strong suit.

“But I kissed you,” Shane points out. “I put the brush _on_. Just, like, brushing all over you. You’re the one who’s been giving off serious no homo vibes this whole time.”

“I’ve been trying to get with you since the actual day we met,” Ryan says, incredulous. He’s starting to think they’ve been working at cross-purposes here. “What was unclear, Shane? Was it the forty billion cups of coffee I brought you? Or were you just really confused by the thing where the quarter’s almost over and I literally still don’t know what the _fuck_ public history is because I haven’t been able to stop staring at your hands long enough to listen to the prof?”

Shane opens his mouth, probably to explain what the fuck public history is, and then he closes it again. He steps aside and holds the door open for Ryan to come inside. Ryan brushes past him and into the apartment with as much dignity as is available to him, which is virtually none.

“You called me _bro_,” Shane says. “The—the first time we met. You called me bro and then proceeded to tell me your house was haunted.”

“That’s basically dirty talk for me,” Ryan admits. “I was…that was a _line_. I was picking you up, dude.”

Shane sits down on his own couch with a thump. “That’s the worst fucking line I’ve ever…are you kidding me? Who calls someone _dude_ when they want to get with them?”

Ryan says a swift mental apology to Curly, who was right the whole time, as usual.

“I do! At the Dark Harbor thing I was all over you, man,” he says. “Nobody’s that scared of haunted houses. How did you not get the whole clutch-your-arm-and-whimper thing? Did you never go to middle school?”

“You’re pulling your moves from the middle school playbook and you wanna come down on _me _for not noticing?”

Ryan shrugs. “I was wooing you. I was trying to figure out your love language.”

“_Pardon_?”

“I honestly have no clue, don’t make me explain it. Curly says it’s a whole thing where, like, you speak one love language and I speak another and I was trying to figure out what love language you speak and it was all gibberish.”

“You should have just tried English,” Shane explodes, “which is a perfectly good language that you know for a fact we both speak!”

They’re both quiet for a long moment. Ryan can tell that Shane is going back through the catalog of the two months they’ve known each other, re-categorizing all the friend stuff into the romantic overtures they were intended to be. If he had his Moleskine he’d probably pull it out to take some notes, make a timeline or some shit.

Ryan doesn’t love a silence but he lets this one sit, trusting Shane will get there when he’s ready.

Shane sighs. He runs his hands through his hair, making it stand up funny, and Ryan has to shove his hands in his pockets to stop from reaching out. “I didn’t think a guy like you, who looks like—who’s, you know, such a sporty lad—I figured you probably had a string of girls after you.”

Ryan sets _sporty lad_ away for later, for mocking purposes. “You didn’t think a jock could like guys? It’s like you’ve never seen a porno set in a frat house before. Or a locker room.”

Shane chokes on air and has a real, proper coughing fit, mouth tucked into his elbow, face bright red. Ryan waits again, as patiently as he can.

“Not, I mean. It wasn’t just the frat thing. I guess I thought you wouldn’t be into this, specifically,” and Shane gestures down the length of himself, the omnipresent flannel and the glasses and the admittedly uninspiring tennis shoes. Then he pokes at Ryan’s bicep. “What with the, you know, the muscles and stuff.”

“The muscles are an illusion to trick people into thinking I’m cool. But I’m so, _so_ not cool, Shane. I’m a mess who steals pens from people so I have an excuse to touch them. I spend my weekends trying to convince spirits to talk to me through a radio, on purpose, for _fun_.”

A ghost of a smile twitches on Shane’s mouth.

“That is pretty uncool.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you!”

And finally, _finally_, Ryan gets a genuine smile out of the guy. It totally transforms his face, bringing all his objectively unusual features together into harmony, so he’s handsome instead of just interesting-looking. Shane really needn’t be self-conscious; Ryan’s so head-over-heels there isn’t a single thing he sees that he doesn’t like.

“I’m sorry I accosted you in the library the other day,” he says, although he doesn’t look that sorry.

Ryan waves him off. “Please. You were obviously overcome with lust at the sight of me with a book in my hands.” 

“Well, it was unprecedented. Then you said the words ‘primary source’ and I was so shocked I _had_ to kiss you.”

“Shut up,” Ryan says, but he means _say more_. “It was a good kiss. You might think about trying it again sometime.”

“I’ll take that under consideration.” Shane shoots a look down the hallway. “Uh, all three of my roommates are here right now, so.”

“Come over this weekend, if you happen to not die of tuberculosis by then,” Ryan says. “We’ve got to work on the project. And other stuff, if you want.”

“Other stuff,” Shane echoes. He looks a little stunned, still, or Ryan would be making a move right now. But he knows by now that Shane’s not that kind of guy; he needs a little time to process. The last thing he did impetuously scared him so shitless he hid from Ryan for a full week and a half, and Ryan doesn’t want that again.

Still, he wants to do something to seal the deal. This deserves some kind of commemoration, a punctuation mark on a very productive conversation.

Ryan reaches out for Shane’s hand, tangles them together for the first time. He brings Shane’s hand to his mouth and bites gently at the skin that connects Shane’s thumb and pointer finger, wondering if anyone has ever touched him with purpose there before.

Shane’s breath catches; his hand shakes as Ryan kisses where he bit and lets his hand fall. Ryan guesses not.

“I can already feel my lungs clearing right up,” Shane says, sounding strangled. “I’ll probably be TB-free by, uh, Friday?”

“Good. I want you in my fucking bed,” Ryan tells him, leaving no room for misinterpretation this time. He watches with satisfaction as Shane’s eyes go dark, dark, dark.

*

Shane was supposed to be here fifteen minutes ago, and Ryan is pacing.

“Cut it the fuck out!” Mark yells from the next room, throwing something at the wall they share that’s probably a shoe.

“I told you to put your headphones on!” Ryan yells back.

He’s been jumpy all week, hovering right on the knife’s edge of excited and nervous and monstrously turned on, and the other brothers have noticed. This morning Curly offered him a Xanax after he nearly broke the toaster by making toast too enthusiastically.

Yesterday TJ walked in on him bent over the bathroom sink, doing deep breathing and mindfulness exercises and sporting an obvious hard-on in his shorts after an attempt at shaving took an abrupt U-turn.

“Uh,” Teej had said, backing away slowly. “No offense, but if you don’t get laid soon I’m going to hire someone to neutralize this situation.”

Ryan had looked up and made eye contact with TJ in the mirror, his eyes sunken and filled with some sort of horny despondency, and TJ had fled. He never did find out whether TJ meant a sex worker or a hit-man.

Anyway, Ryan’s pacing. He’s just trying to figure out if it’s more likely that Shane changed his mind about this or that he’s dead when there’s a sharp knock on the door of his room.

Ryan goes to throw it open, and then he catches himself. He’s not cool, obviously, but that doesn’t mean he can’t try a little to hide it. So he eases the door open, and it’s Shane.

“Hey bro,” Shane says. It sounds hilarious and unnatural coming out of his mouth, as he obviously intended.

“Yo,” Ryan says. He does the patented bro head nod, and Shane sort of does it back (not well, but it’s not in his blood, it’s fine), and Ryan steps aside to let him in.

“Your friend Curly let me in. He only leered at me a little so I thought that it went—you know, okay.”

“I might have talked to him about you kind of a lot.”

Shane raises his eyebrows. “Good things, I hope.”

“Mostly that I want to touch your hair and jump your bones and doodle your name inside all my notebooks and suck on your fingers. Really just variations on that theme, over and over, for months.”

“Good theme.” Shane drops his backpack to one side, to be immediately forgotten about. They can work on the project later, if there’s time. “I bet we can knock two or three of those off at once. Just—” he mimes slicing through the air viciously with a finger— “cross ‘em right off the ol’ bucket list.”

Ryan sits down on the edge of his bed. He reaches out for Shane’s left wrist, and he starts to undo the watch he always wears there. It’s a nice watch, with a dark brown leather band and a big silver face, the kind you don’t see a lot of young guys wearing a watch these days. It’s another one of those old-fashioned aesthetic touches that Ryan finds so deeply appealing about Shane.

He unbuckles the watch and slides it off Shane’s wrist, savoring each touch to the fine bones of Shane’s hand as he goes. Shane stands there and looks down at him while he does it, facial features arranged in a stunned expression.

When Ryan sets the watch on his bedside table, Shane lets his breath out in a whoosh. “Christ, that’s—why is that so hot?”

Ryan brings Shane’s hand back to his mouth, sucks Shane’s middle finger in. There are ink-stains there, from the fucking pen, and Ryan can almost taste the ink in the back of his throat. There’s a callus on Shane’s middle finger from writing, and Ryan runs the flat of his tongue over it.

“Ryan,” Shane says, his voice shaky. He sinks to the floor in front of Ryan, on his knees, and Ryan eases his legs apart so Shane can slide between them if he so chooses. He really, really hopes Shane will so choose.

He does. Shane’s hands fall to the waist of Ryan’s jeans, shaking as they struggle with the button and zip.

“Bet you wish I was wearing those basketball shorts now,” Ryan jokes, and he’s surprised when Shane doesn’t laugh too. Instead he groans a little, low and deep in the back of his throat.

Ryan’s working on a theory. He’s got an inkling of an idea that what he had originally taken for Shane’s disdain over the whole frat thing is in fact well-disguised sexual shame, something that gets Shane’s motor running even as he hates himself a little for it. He’d thought Shane had been staring at his California broski attire with distaste, the night they met, but now he’s considering the possibility that Shane wants to be ever so slightly _hazed_.

Ryan can be that. It’s not really him, but it’s part of him, that brash, over-confident character he doesn’t fully own but plays at sometimes, on the court or during Rush. He can play at it now if it works for Shane.

“Oh no, should I have gone hardcore slutty frat guy for you?” he asks Shane. “Did you _want_ the snapback and the tank top and the whole crass asshole thing? Should I get out my jock strap?”

Shane pulls his pants and underwear off in one swift, vicious yank, making Ryan laugh and fall backwards on the bed. Sounds like a resounding yes to him.

“I’ll call you bro when I nut in your mouth, how’s that,” Ryan promises. Shane whines, an almost inhuman noise of longing and need that Ryan recognizes only because it’s been the noise his soul’s been making for the last several days, and leans in to swallow him down without another word.

Shane gets his mouth around Ryan’s dick and looks up at Ryan expectantly, and Ryan loses the entirety of what remains of his cool. Shane holds himself there, waiting, not moving, until Ryan’s hands come down on his head and his fingers thread into his hair.

“Yeah,” Shane mumbles, pulling off for a second. “That’s—yeah.” He lets Ryan pull him back, putting his mouth where Ryan wants it.

There’s another bang on the wall.

“I said put your fucking headphones on, Mark! Jesus!” Ryan yells. He reaches out for anything nearby, finds the remote control to his TV, and throws it at the wall in response.

He’s afraid it will ruin the mood, but if anything it seems to have the opposite effect. Shane takes him deeper, eyes watering, and makes a small desperate gasp around Ryan’s cock that has him close already. Something about it—being here in the frat house, knowing the other guys can hear, that they know exactly what they’re doing—seems to be doing it for him.

“Oh, you like it, don’t you?” Ryan breathes. He pulls a little on Shane’s hair, not hard, just enough to feel the silky strands between his fingers, and to know Shane feels it too. “You love that they know you’re in here on your knees for me. Gonna let me copy your notes after? Gonna get me an A after I give you that D?”

Shane pulls off again with a splutter and a bark of a laugh. “Holy shit, Ryan.”

“Sorry, too much?”

“No, I’m impressed. You should rethink film production, you’re wasted behind the camera.”

Watching Shane swallow around him, Ryan’s impressed too. He’s all the more impressed because he’s pretty sure this isn’t something Shane’s done a whole lot. There’s something in the way he can’t quite control his breathing, something in the way he takes more than he can manage, something in the desperate grip of his fingers on Ryan’s hips, that says he’s sucked a couple of dicks—but maybe _only_ a couple, and he doesn’t want Ryan to know it.

“You’re so good at that,” Ryan murmurs, trying to hold Shane’s head where he wants it without giving him too much. He wills himself to not to let his hips snap off the bed, to be gentle while maintaining the illusion that he’s not being gentle. “You’re gonna make me come.”

It’s a warning, not phrased as a warning, so Shane can make of it what he likes. Ryan’s not picky about it; he’d get himself off right now, just looking at Shane on his knees, and be grateful.

Shane’s eyes flick up to him, _so come already_, and the dare alone gets Ryan most of the rest of the way there.

The hot, steady suction of Shane’s mouth is good enough, the slide of his hair under Ryan’s hands is good enough. Ryan doesn’t need more. Still, he doesn’t complain when one of Shane’s hands slides from his hip to reach for his balls and then back, to press against his perineum. The pressure nudges at his prostate from the outside, sending little phantom shocks of pleasure shooting through him.

In the end he can’t quite manage the promised ‘bro.’ Shane’s thumb slides lower still, coming to rest and rub gently at his hole, which is _cheating_, and Ryan delivers on his promise and comes with a shudder and an uncontrollable jerk of his hips down Shane’s throat, as deep as he can get. “Shane,” he hisses, one long exhale he feels all the way down to the point of his toes.

To his credit, Shane takes it pretty well. He coughs a little again as he pulls off, wiping his mouth. “Whoa,” he says. His voice is wrecked, sore-sounding and scratchy, and it sends another hot flush of cavemannish pleasure skittering down Ryan’s back to know he did that.

Ryan lies there for a moment, letting his brain cells—which had all blown wide, scattered to the far corners of his head—gradually come floating back together to click into place again.

“Oh no, the whole chess club is gonna know what you’ve been doing,” he says in a goofy voice, and Shane snickers.

Ryan pulls him up, off the floor, onto the narrow bed. He’s gotten off but he’s still desperate for it, desperate to see Shane, desperate to touch him. When he reaches his hand down he finds Shane’s pants already undone and half off his hips, his underwear askew.

“Couldn’t wait, huh? You need it that bad?”

“Pretty much,” Shane confesses, letting his hips stutter forward when Ryan shoves his pants and trunks the rest of the way down, spits in his hand, and wraps it around Shane’s dick. “Oh god.”

“You know,” Ryan says, falling back into character on a hunch, keeping his voice too low for Mark or anyone else to hear through the wall. “I don’t think it’s fair to keep a mouth like that all to myself.”

He slides his hand up Shane’s dick, grip as tight as he can make it without worrying it’s uncomfortable, catching and twisting around the head. He’d been thinking of going for the lube, but he doesn’t need to. Shane’s all wet already, leaking in uneven spurts all over Ryan’s hand and his UCLA blanket.

“Yeah?” Shane asks, egging him on. His hand comes up to grip at Ryan’s bicep, so hard it might bruise. Ryan hopes it will.

“Mmm,” Ryan agrees, speeding up. “I think maybe I should share you with the guys. Pass you around the whole frat, have you blow all of ‘em. Let them fuck your throat, one after the other. Would you like that?”

“Fuck—” It’s a rough, bitten-out noise, heavy on the consonants and light on the vowel, like it’s torn its way out of Shane’s sore throat without his permission.

“You gonna let my brothers run train on you, _bro_?”

He feels Shane’s cock swell and twitch under his hand as Shane comes, spilling hot and abundantly all over his stomach and well up his chest, and on Ryan’s arm and hip too.

Shane starts to laugh, low and quiet, still ragged from how out of breath he is. He brings his hands up to cover his face. Ryan can see the pink flush creeping out from the edges of his fingertips and down his chest.

He reaches out to absent-mindedly run his fingertips through the come on Shane’s stomach, and Shane peeks out at him through fingers.

“I—to be clear—I don’t actually, like, want that,” he tells Ryan, his voice faint and embarrassed.

“Good,” Ryan says. “Because honestly we mostly just do a lot of community service and throw some chill keggers, I don’t think—”

“Jesus.”

Ryan’s laughing now, bent over Shane and wheezing into his shoulder. “I don’t think they’re gonna be lining up for the blowbang any time soon. The main bonding activity in this house is that on Monday nights we all get together and watch the Bachelor.”

“Another fantasy ruined,” Shane says with an overdramatic flop, reaching for tissues to clean himself off.

*

They do eventually get around to working on Ruining History, putting the finishing touches on the script and sending an outline to Sara and Kate and Garrick for filming on Sunday. They’ll get the whole thing done in time, but it’ll be by the skin of their teeth.

Something’s nagging at Ryan, though, and he wants to clear the air.

“You know I’m not really like that, right?” He thinks Shane knows. He thinks the two months they spent ineptly dancing around each other afforded them the opportunity to know each other as friends, as people. But he has to make sure.

Shane turns his head to look over at Ryan. He’s lying on his stomach on Ryan’s bed, stretched the wrong way across so most of his legs dangle off the side. He really is an extra-long twin-sized bed of a person. “Like what?”

“I just mean,” Ryan starts, a little embarrassed, “like, I’m definitely a frat guy, and I’m a jock, but I’m also a…a ghost hunter, and a Disney fanatic, and I cried watching Paddington 2, and I kind of think all my friends secretly hate me, including you.”

“You’re a bitch, you’re a lover, you’re a child, you’re a mother,” Shane says agreeably. “Yes, I know, Ryan. You’re a little bit of everything, all rolled into one. What’s your point?”

Ryan rubs his hand over his jaw.

“I don’t want you to be disappointed,” Ryan says. “If sometimes—when—”

“Oh,” Shane says, suddenly sly. “So what I’m _hearing_ is that you want to make sure I know you’re a very manly man but that sometimes you want to get fingerbanged into the stratosphere.”

“Shut up, Shane.” Ryan can feel his face heating up. That’s not what he meant, but it’s also not wrong.

“You’re the whole-ass Breakfast Club in one person and I respect it,” Shane goes on, gaining steam. “It would be my honor to fuck you so hard that this entire house will think you’re being murdered. You can be all the things, and one of those things will be _demolished_.”

“Holy shit.” Ryan laughs, charmed and turned on in equal measure.

“Ryan ‘Brat Pack’ Bergara.” Shane flops over onto his back and gives Ryan a fond upside-down look. “Yes, the athlete is hot, the princess is growing on me, but I think the basket case is my favorite.”

Ryan is sure then that Shane knows exactly what he’s trying to say.

“Well, good, because that’s the one you’re getting most of the time.”

“I’m just saying it would be great if the basket case could wear a jock strap once in a while,” Shane says, and then he does a not-very-graceful roll off the end of the bed to dodge the notebook Ryan’s aiming at his head.

He lands on the floor with a loud thump, and then there’s a _second_ thump as Mark throws something particularly heavy at the wall, and then they both dissolve into laughter. And a few minutes later, when the laughter turns into sighs and whispers, Ryan will feel lucky to be so seen, and known, and understood. He’ll reach out for Shane’s hand again, after, and know it was worth the wait.


End file.
